What interests me the most are not only the reasons
why some children’s books become classics (oh, the list is long…) but also the
way authors use words and language. I have a passion for words that words alone
cannot describe. Let me put it this way. You know the old ice-breaking game
“what would you bring with you to a desert island?”… I would bring a dictionary. Preferably one with
synonyms, etymology and collocations. I am mad for words. Give me neologisms to
translate, and I will be the happiest translator on Earth.
I approached my first draft of Là dove stanno le cose selvagge with certain boldness. While I was
working on it, I had that feeling only translators know: this is the right direction. I was happy with many of the choices I
made, every sentence seemed to fit like a glove, but. But.
At some point, I realised that there was something
that sounded wrong, almost out of key. I read and re-read my translation,
looking for unconvincing verb tenses, superfluous possessives, well-conceived
grammatical discrepancies. What was it? What is it that sounds so wrong?
Ohhh. Got it.
The wild
things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth
and rolled
their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws
but Max
stepped into his private boat and waved good-bye […]
Le cose selvagge
ruggirono terribilmente e digrignarono i terribili denti,
e spalancarono i
terribili occhi e mostrarono i terribili artigli,
ma Max salì sulla sua
barca e fece ciao con la manina […]
Here’s a gloss of the last sentence, where the off-key note is.
ma Max salì
sulla sua barca
e fece ciao con
la manina […]
but Max stepped on-the
his boat and
did bye with
the little-hand DIM.
La manina. The
little hand. It’s back.
Don’t get me wrong, I love diminutives and all kinds
of alterations. But I have become very sensitive to using them when addressing
to children since I have worked for the British Council in Milan as young
learners’ assistant. One of my duties was to walk my caterpillars (pre-primary school children) to the toilet during classes,
and one day it happened that I asked one of them to give me their manina (little-hand). My supervisor had
heard me and she kindly urged me not to use diminutives with children. After
all, what from our point of view is a cute little child hand, from their point
of view is… just their hand. Proportions, uh?
I had forgotten about this, but then the manina came back in my translation of Where the Wild Things Are. I did a
little bit of research on the topic, and I found that the debate on what expert
call “baby-talk” is lively. On one side, “baby-talk” seems to be encouraged
because it bonds a strong relationship between parents and children (it is also
called parentese), and because it
also contributes to children’s mental development; on the other, it is strongly
criticised for giving the child a limited repertoire of words, and therefore
can inhibit the child’s speech development.
What should the translator do?
Personally, I’ve decided to put away the little hand.
Partly because my supervisor’s argument seemed strong enough to me. Then I also
thought: what if by using diminutives we contribute to build a wrong child
image in children’s literature? How would an Italian child describe Max’s hand?
And even if s/he said manina, how can
we be sure that s/he has not been influenced by the baby-talk employed by
adults that surround him?
I have no answers for these questions, not at the
moment. Anyway, I don’t think I’m wrong when I say that Where the Wild Things Are is a book to be read aloud by parents to their
child, and if they really want to say manina
instead of mano, certainly I won’t be
the one preventing them from doing that!
See also:
How can child-directed speech facilitate the acquisition of morphology?, by Vera
Kempe, Patricia J. Brooks, and Laura Pirott. 2001. Research on Child Language
Acquisition: Proceedings of the 8th Conference of the International
Association for the Study of Child Language. 1234-1244)
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My name is Elena Traina, I
graduated in Lingue e Letterature
Straniere at the Università degli Studi di Milano, now I’m studying
Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia. I translate from English
and Spanish into Italian. My main literary interest is children’s literature,
but I also like to write and translate poetry and short fiction. I can be
reached at elena.traina39@gmail.com.
If you
are interested in the MA in Literary Translation, or would like to study at UEA,
I also recommend that you take a look at my Italian blog: http://www.elenainuk.blogspot.it
